I finished watching the first season of The Punisher early last week and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m glad to see marvel back in form after the disappointing Defenders and the irresponsible Iron fist. The Punisher in fact surprised me quite a bit with it’s story. It digs into a lot of uncomfortable places in regards to combat veterans returning from war, dealing with lost limbs, friends, PTSD and what it looks like to return to a peace time society and how in many ways society has forgotten about them. But I don’t want to talk about any of that right now, I want to talk about guns.

So many guns

I don’t know if I’d call myself a gun enthusiast, It’s a hobby that only comes in second to Warhammer 40k in terms of financial investment. But I do work with guns, I’ve carried a gun openly or concealed for years now both professionally and privately. I am absolutely not Frank Castle, which only highlights the frustration when I can see bullets become magic, competent men become idiots and writers breaking the rules of their fiction.

Bleeding is deadly, so are bullets.

I find it interesting that most time when I watch a movie or read a book. You see somebody get shot and it immediately incapacitates them, which unless you shot somebody in a particularly vital spot, is horse shit. There is at least one case out there of a mugger shooting his victim, and then get’s beaten to death by the victim. A single or even multiple gun shot wounds require minutes to cause people to bleed out.

But that’s not something that you really have to worry about in The Punisher, bullet tend to kill people when they should with the exception of Frank Castle and his major Antagonist. Specifically there’s a scene where Frank is fighting a group of Para military baddies, before the fight scene opens up Frank takes a arrow to his shoulder, near the middle of it he has bullet graze his torso. Later frank wins the fights, stumbles out of the forest, passes out and is later found and stitched back together. Happy Ending.

Sort of

Except that the beginning of the fight scene is shown to take place relatively early in the afternoon, and when Frank is found it’s the dead of night, when they pull back Franks clothes to show the wound to his torso, he has huge gash from the shot he took. The man was fighting like this and carrying an also wounded friend around the forest for hours. Without any kind of dressing for your wound you’ll bleed out in minutes, five, ten, fifteen or thirty minutes top.

Later in another fire fight, Frank shoots a baddy in face, through the cheek and the asshole spits the bullet back out complete undeformed. No broken bones, all of his teeth intact and a big middle finger to physics. For a show that’s aimed for and in many cases succeeded at gritty realism that the series is known for, I’m really disappointed that they managed to miss the mark on this. Especially when they could have easily rectified this by changing little things. In the forest have frank carry a little first aid pack so he can slap on a bandage shortly after he got shot. The bad guy should have been shot through and through, it still likely would have broken his jaw from the impact and it would have tested my sense of disbelief for the guy not to loose any teeth. But it would have been so much better them him spitting the bullet back out.

another thing worth pointing out, It’s kind of hard to explain how loud guns really are to people who’ve never been near one when it’s fired. The noise is quite serious to the point that even in an open and outdoors environment with a suppressor you still need earplugs or some other sort of ear protection to protect yourself from hearing damage. Which means Frank Castle’s tinnitus is worse the Sterling Archer’s.

Wait… I had something for this.

Seriously, at the end of the season Frank has shoot out in a tiny concrete bunker and as soon as the bullets are done fly he picks up phone and talks into it like nothing has happened, as if several seconds of unprotected ears hearing automatic several automatic weapons and explosions are capable of handling communication without the intervention of an Otorhinolaryngologist and time to recover.

Guns don’t make you stupid.

I guess this one isn’t exactly about guns per say, but I think it’s worth noting. Frank Castle is highly trained combat veteran who is routinely shown to out gun, out smart and out shoot special forces level soldiers and para military mercenaries. So why is it that occasionally when frank is in a tight spot, these elite enemies go full storm trooper.

Never go full storm trooper

Firearms are interesting weapons in that they are incredibly simple use and if you put one in the hands of an average adult and point them at a man sized piece of paper, they’ll hit it. He may not be laying down head shots, he may not be hitting in the ten ring, but with a seventeen round magazine for a full sized pistol at twenty feet away, he’ll hit the damn piece of paper at least once or twice.

So why the shit can’t any of these highly trained combat veterans hit god damned frank castle from ten feet away. I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer is one of two simple things: A, the writers got lazy, wrote frank into a difficult situation and couldn’t think of smart way to get him out of it or B, they simply haven’t had any experience with firearms and wrote them like they were magic, making them do whatever the situation required of them(I’m leaning towards the latter).

There’s another clear sign of this in a scene where frank is attempting to assassinate a man in his home. He lines up his shot and pulls the trigger once the man is standing in front of his window only for the round to be stopped by bullet resistant glass. The show doubles down on the dumb, one the target just stands in front of the glass after it’s been shot and two frank doesn’t dump three more rounds into the glass for good measure.

I called it bullet resistant glass because no glass is bullet proof, some are are just better then others. The glass is rated for a particular degree of protection, some of it stops handgun rounds other stop high powered rifles, but all of it is rated for a certain number strikes. The glass shown in the show is relatively thin, so if it was truly resistant in the first place, it was likely only rated for hand gun rounds, which Frank’s rifle would have bored through easily, if it was heavier stuff, the logical thing for frank to do is to shoot the glass until it fails. but instead he and his target stare at each other for a bit and then the scene cuts away.

The scene it’self is a problem it’s not the real problem. The real issue is that this could all easily be avoided by doing five minutes of research. Then consulting with actual experts and maybe sending the writing team and the director to a range and just let them shoot a few guns for the day.

The take away.

What can we take away from this as writers? Pay attention to your to the details in your story, they do matter. I’m not saying you need to become a scholar on the history of whatever technology your story, but getting the details right even if it’s only behind the scenes helps keep people from being jarred out of the narrative when shit hit’s the fan. If nothing else, it would be nice for me not to have shout angrily at my TV in the middle of night when my wife is trying to sleep.

So I don’t know about you guys but, I spend entirely to much time on the internet and unfortunately a not insignificant amount of that time is spent on writing stuff. where else would I steal ideas for blog posts from, unfortunately people need step up their game, cause I couldn’t find anything interesting to plagiarize comment on this week. Instead I want to go over some of the questions that seem to crop up on every writing forum on the internet and cobble together a post about how all your writing is garbage, and how that’s ok.

I mean, look at how many people went to see suicide Squad.

Is my idea good enough?

This is the first one, every day I refresh the page of my favorite writing websites every fifteen to twenty time and the same one or two posts are up at the top asking if their ideas are good enough to write a book about. The answer is of course not, your ideas are unoriginal hacked together thoughts based on the other bits of media you enjoy that other writers did better then you.

The reality is that no ideas are good enough, not Space vikings gladiators, not wizard detectives, not even animated mice are good enough.

This joke has been removed at the request of The Walt Disney Company

But do you want to know the best part about not being good enough? When you accept that the Ideas don’t matter, your free to write what ever you want. Whether your aiming to produce the next, To Kill a Mockingbird or Fifty Shades of Gray fan fiction.

Now here’s a franchise I’m comfortable mocking.

How do I deal with writers block?

This is the number 2 question, almost as common as number one and if I had the answer I’d be a published author and not some hack blogger on the internet. What I do know is that writing is hard, that writing when the muse strikes doesn’t work for most people and that if you only write when writing is fun then you probably not going to finish what ever project your working on. So maybe that means you write shit for a while, stuff that your not entirely happy with.

Hell as I’m writing this it’s 3am and I’m barley pushing through it and I still don’t know what I’m going to have as my third point. And that’s ok.

I seriously have no idea what i’m doing

Can I edit as I go or should I wait till I’m finished?

There comes a time in every writer’s life where they look at their work and say, “I’ve smelled dumpster fires at sewage plant better then this shit.” This is where our last question comes from, should I edit now or wait. I’m a big proponent of not editing a manuscript until it’s been finished, the best advice I’ve ever received on this topic was this, “If you want to be good at writing a first page, them rewrite your first page, but if you want to be good at finishing a novel then you need to finish a novel.”

But the reality is that every writer has their own approach, Steven King has commented that his books only need minor revisions, Neil Gaiman puts his books through multiple revisions and I’m pretty sure Twilight wasn’t edited at all.

Seriously, how does the romantic pairing of a wolf man thing and a smallish girl child survive any form or editorial oversight.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the editing process is, so long as you finish your book in a way that’s satisfying to you. So feel free use the stuff on this blog, but take it all with a grain of salt, after all my writing is garbage.

So I’ve recently been digging into Fox’s “Gotham” TV series, It’s what I’d call a mixed bag with some really good performances from some of it’s actors, even though it requires me to mentally prepare myself that this show has very few shits to give about it’s continuity with the rest of DC’s Batman comics. It’s a dark and gritty Noir detective story featuring James Gordon early in his Career at the GCPD as he hunts down the progressively stranger criminals of Gotham. And they don’t come any weirder then Jerome Valeska.

Look at that smile, doesn’t it just scream well adjusted adult.

Also and Just in case.

Spoilers Ahead

Presentation: Steal the Show

Gotham is packed full of crazy super villains, Poison Ivy, Mr. Fries, Firefly. It’s underworld is often ruled by intelligent and charismatic mobsters. The criminal element makes some beautiful scenery in Gotham giving you a simultaneous feeling of being in a comic book and in the godfather, it’s packed with larger the life characters.

Jerome is what happens when you take charismatic and crazy and turn it up to eleven. Whether it’s his initial reveal after discovering he murdered his mother, that time he sat a school bus on fire or that night he was wandering around without his face. Whenever Jerome is on stage all eyes are on him, which is an impressive talent when half the criminal underworld has superpowers and the only thing you’ve accomplished in life so far is to murder your mother.

Sixteen seasons in and I’m starting to think this asshole forgot about it.

Whether it’s spelling out you names with bodies dropped from a tall building, setting a bus full of cheerleaders on fire or just running around town without your face, when your villain makes his way onto your pages he should demand to be the star of the show. And who would tell him otherwise?

Plot: Taking refuge in absurdity

Part of Gotham’s Charm is that it takes all of it’s weirdest elements and plays them straight. It’s cops to doing cop stuff in a city that just happens to have people who can control others with there mind, or have blood that turns anybody it touches into a psychopath. It’s always played straight and it’s always taken seriously.

An in-spite of this it’s an anything but ordinary psychopath who pushes plausibility to it’s limits. Jerome killed his mother for being a nag, fought with a man with a katana using a chainsaw, then played Russian roulette for the the sword, pulling the trigger on himself three times in a row in revolver that only held five rounds.

The most beautiful thing Jerome has blessed the show with his appearance is a spark of insanity that says “While I’m on screen anything goes.”

Who’s the boss

Legacy: Achieving your promises

I think ultimately what makes Jerome an intensely fun to watch is his laughter, from the first moment he laughs in his debut episode the show makes a promise to it’s viewers. This character is a legend, one of the most Iconic villains if not the most Iconic villain of our modern era, and here’s how he got his start. When your working with a character that has almost 80 years of story behind him when you start to write, it puts a burden on the character and in this case the actor who portrays him.

Jerome is mostly wonderful mix of Mark Hamill’s and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the character. He has all the manic energy and stage presence of the joker from the animated series and all the calculating malice that Ledger brought to the silver screen in “The Dark Knight.” The writers and the actor portraying Jerome have a fine tuned understanding of the character they wanted to put on TV and they followed through with it.

What does that mean for all of us not working on characters who have been in print longer then many of us have been alive. It’s simple, when you set up a character, the moment that you bring him on to the page or put him on a screen, you’re making a promise to your audience. You promise to make this character the best version of who ever he or she is and when you come through on these promises your audience will love you for it.

The last time I wrote a character focus it was about a villain you could respect, maybe even love. This time were going to focus on a much different kind of character, one who get’s slapped around by a dwarf, one who let’s his sword be stolen by a little girl, on who hides behind his mothers skirts. This weeks Character Focus presents none other than Joffrey Baratheon.

May the Others take him.

For those of you who don’t know, Joffery Baratheon is one of the major antagonist in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, for those of you who haven’t read the books I need to post some quite obvious spoiler warnings

spoilers Ahead

That ought to work, now down to business. Joff is signigficantly different then most characters and even villains that you read about these days, mostly because he’s a intolerable twat. Most writer’s resources will tell you that your villains need to be deep and likable in one way or another, Joff however stands out as being as deep as dry lake bed and only being slightly well like more the AIDs and yet the character serves his purpose quite well and while I may never like Joff, I always have some sort of emotional response to his scenes, albeit it’s mostly hate, mixed with some disgust. So how do we emulate such response from our readers regarding our dastardly villains?

Threat: somebody is going to die

Martin is well know as an author who loses little sleep from killing beloved characters, and when Joffery takes center stage that threat becomes overbearing, When ever he has scene the tension jumps dramatically simply because of the characters reputation. In the TV show Game of Thrones, Joff has Ned Stark beheaded even though his mother and all of his councilors had planned to spare him. In the Show this is done in the middle of a courtyard, but in the books it’s done in the middle of a temple so that everybody got the idea that this was to be a pardoning not an execution. Joff made short work of that and the started off on his own blody rain of death and brutality.

plotting: The best laid plans…

Outside of fits of violence the boy king can be counted on to make bad decisions, which act as boon to enemies and torment to his family. In book series like A Song of Ice and Fire which follows characters from every side of the central conflict, you have to juggle success and failure vary carefully, because for evert victory a pov character has counts as failure on another, let one person grow to strong and the book becomes one sided. Joffery helps balance out the successes of his compatriots who normally wouldn’t make such foolish mistakes, and forces them to work around Joffery’s madness.

Foils: Making Men out of monsters

For those of you who aren’t in the know, a dramatic foil(just foil for short) is when a pair of characters are paired together to make there traits stand out, often done in a simple fashion to make strong characters look stronger and make smart characters to look smarter. However a foil can be used for far more the exemplifying simple traits, it can be used to muffle them as well take Joffery’s loyal hound Sandor Clegane, who spends most of his time drinking, killing, and the drinking some more. Yet in moments when he, Sansa are together, the reader has to pause and really think about whether or not Sandor is all that bad of guy. Joff has a similar affect on everybody around him, by the nature of being the most monstrously hated character in the room, everybody else looks like better person for it.

“I may have started a war that killed million and committed acts of genocide, but at least I never laid a hand on Sansa Stark”- Hitler

Joffery is going to go down as one of the most hated characters in the history of American fiction, he’s craven, crule, incompotent, he’s everything that writers are told to avoid, but leave it to writer like Martin to pull off such a character in such a splendid fashion, and let it be reminder to other writers out there that at the end of the day, write the characters you want to write, write the characters you need to write and don’t let any other writer tell you otherwise even if that writing leads to little incestful balls of hatred and abomination so evil that Dalek wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.

Like this:

This week’s feature story come from Mike Aguerro over at Night Mares of a writer, who asked me if I could feature a manuscript of his episode from work in progress series Icarus. The main reason I decided to feature mike is because he asked, and his asking meant I didn’t have to put down A Storm of Swords or get out of my sick bed and hunt down somebody else and read their work then get permission from them to post the work. What I’m trying to say is that I’m both sick and lazy and people who want to be featured should take advantage of my sick and lazy nature.

The secondary reason I featured Mike’s work is because I’ve not yet featured a screenplay on the site and I think screenplays can teach writers some very useful lesson that get drowned out in when try to write a novel or short story. The problem with novel writing is that it throws a lot of things at you and requires you to learn them all at once, you need to understand character Pov, setting, flow, dialogue and ect… . A screen play simplifies at least two of those things, those being setting and pov and instead focuses you in on the dialogue of the characters to drive your story forwards. That doesn’t mean the other things aren’t important, but for us novel writers reading a manuscript let’s us focus on the dialogue and find out what works, what doesn’t and why.

If you enjoyed this bit of writing I urge you to jump over to Nightmare of a writer and give the rest of his works a read or listen to the podcast we share together, or if your truly bored you could read his actual blog posts.

As a side note to anyone who’s following and wondering why most post schedule is off…. again, I’ve been sick in bed for the past week and have just gotten to my computer as of today to write something. hopefully something resembling a post schedule will resume next Monday with another character focus.

Time travel in storytelling is almost as old as it is confusing, early writings pop up in Hindu mythology with the story of king Kakudmi who travels through time after moving to another plane of existence and back. The king finds he’s traveled ages into the future and all of his friends and family dead, this is just one of many old stories that show up with men traveling to the future in various ways.

Time Travel to the past is more recent idea that only started to show up in early 1800’s With first story being told by a Russian author Alexander Veltman who wrote about going back in time to meet Aristotle and Alexander the Great.

But enough about History let’s get into the good stuff. What makes time travel interesting is hard to pin down when you take into consideration how it’s used. Is time travel your heroes superpower? Is it a one time thing? Can you control it with a time machine or is a random thing?

Does it require you to get to 88mph

Time Travel primarily functions in one of two ways in fiction, one is as a setting where the lead character and company travel to different periods of time to go about there story. The second and more confusing way is as a plot device which can and usually does include time travel as a setting but also as device to give the story more depth and complexity.

Time Travel as a Setting

Time travel as a setting is best favored by fiction that follows an episodic narrative. This format for time travel is widely used cartoons, Live action shows, comics and any other media where the setting can be changed from episode to episode and the time travel itself is just a means of changing that setting. This may not be the first thing that come to your mind when you think of time travel but it is the most common as it’s often feature in children’s cartoons like Phineas and Ferb where inventing a time machine was really just another way to have an adventure, while most cartoons only used this form of time travel as one shot gimmick for that weeks episode, some cartoons built this version of time travel as their shows engine for moving the story.

If you don’t remember this then your not old enough to use the internet

Flint The Time detective was a show that followed the evolving monster models that Pokemon had already established, Flint was a boy who traveled far and wide to catch monsters. Sound familiar, what set flint apart from it’s contemporaries was it’s driving gimmick, time travel. Flint was a cavema… caveboy and each episode had him travel through time trying to hunt down different cute and quirky monsters. Without time travel as a setting Flint would have never gotten off the ground. It also needs to be pointed out that this format hasn’t been restricted to kid’s cartoons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles featured a video game based around time travel as a setting called Turtles in Time where each level was placed in a different era in time. Maybe more famously the 2005 re-boot of Doctor Who heavily featured this in it’s first season and still does now, thought it grew more complex as the show went on.

When done well this form of time travel can be used to produce interesting characters and settings to help enrich your story, however some authors tend to rely on the gimmick as a way of making there story interesting instead of using it to help create interesting characters and places. Once again I’m going to turn back to Doctor Who primarily the first season of the reboot where the Time Travel was used mostly as means of putting the Doctor and his companion into different settings like a space station orbiting a dying earth or elizabethan England. The early episodes featured fantastical places but had poorly developed characters. While the Doctor was plenty interesting, Rose Tyler suffered early on in the series, and her mother and ex-boyfriend never became more then buzzing noise in the audience’s ears as they tried to watch the show. Russel T. Davies, the shows main writer at the time, leaned heavily on his settings and forgot to make interesting characters and regardless of where in time your fiction is taking place, if the people in it or boring the rest of the story will be as well.

But all will be forgiven if they bring back Jack

Time Travel as a Plot Device

Time travel as a plot device is often more confusing and far more prone to abuse. In it’s plot device form is easily applicable to all forms of fiction and media, and while it can used different ways by different writers the main similarity is that it is a constant and controllable device that is used for more then just shuttling characters from place to place.

But what separates the good from the bad? The mark of an author using time travel well is that it allows them to both create and solve problems in a unique fashion. It important to note that Time travel can be used to create trouble for the lead, if it’s only a positive force with no limitation it begins to create problems for the writer as they struggle with ways to challenge the stories lead. Limiting the leads ability to travel through time and having those same abilities used against him forces the writer to come up with creative ways solve problems and serves as an excellent way to build tension and gives the audience something worth viewing.

No one seems to do this better then the current lead writer for Doctor Who, Steven Moffat and nobodies done it better then what is possibly the most famous episode of the rebooted DW series, Blink. Spoilers ahead fellows so If you haven’t watched This particular episode of DW leave now, I mean it. Go google the episode, watch and then come back here and finish this article.Are they gone? good, okay, let’s get back to the article.

Bring me my brown pants

Blink is one of the better if not the best known DW episodes for a host of reasons, what aspiring writers want to focus on is how Moffat used time travel against the characters in the show to drive up tension and emotions. He used time travel from the beginning to ramp up tensions, first with messages from the past, then with mysterious notes and disappearing friends and then with a dying love interest. All of which happen because they were transported back in time and the same things that got them are after the shows lead sally sparrow. Moffat also used this as chance to show off the Doctor’s brilliance, instead having him sonic his way out of the situation as many a writer have done, Moffat instead chose to have the Doctor work out his problems without the use of his TARDIS and mostly off screen. By sending messages through time the slow way, by writing recording and waiting, the Doctor was able to communicate with sally sparrow so she could retrieve the TARDIS and save the day.

Another interesting thing to note about this episode is that Moffat kept the setting relativity current, with only a few scenes from the past and having most of the episode take place in the present, time travel was used strictly as a device for the characters to use to move the story forward.

While Moffat used time travel brilliantly, the most common problem with using time travel is that it get’s awfully complicated awfully quick, Moffat makes a nod toward this in Blink by the doctor try to explain time as “a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” Because of this time travel has been abused and misused on numerous occasions either leading to fridge logic, like why on earth didn’t Harry Potter just a time turner to solve everything ever or how many episodes of DW are laced with paradoxes that aren’t even attempted to be given a nod, both examples leave their viewers saying WTF?.

But.. how.. when… A Fez? This doesn’t even make sense

The problem comes from a writer looking for either a quick way out of problem they’ve landed their character in or that they were looking for a way to give their story more depth and complexity and instead just made it muddled and confusing. Your audience will like having their minds blown, they won’t like being left confused and frustrated.

Time Travel and You

As you can see time travel can get complicated, but don’t let it scare you away from writing with it. While you’ll probably blunder through it for a while you can take solace in the fact that people Like Moffat and Davies screw up even at the professional level. And don’t be afraid to let your creativity flourish, the rule of cool applies to most time travel stories and if it’s interesting enough most viewers will let it pass even if it get’s hard to understand and if they start asking to many questions just tell them “It’s complicated” and hope they don’t respond “I’m clever.”

Ever wake up in the morning and think, “Man I hate people.” If so you’re well on your way to being a Jerk, if you’ve actually worked up the vitriol to actually tell people you hate then; and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you are a jerk. Other symptoms to watch for include but are not limited to:

Anger
Snark
Greed
Arrogance
Lack of patience
Aggressive or passive aggressive behavior
And a general disregard for the safety and feelings of others(not to be confused with apathy towards others though it may apply as well)

What’s that? My foot up your ass you say, well okay.

The Jerk is an interesting and old character easily older then Shakespeare whom has several prominent Jerks in his works . The Jerk has survived through the generations as other characters and tropes faded into the ages, the question is, Why? Why do we love these people in media when every time you meet one in real life you have to hold your self back from pushing them into oncoming traffic. Though truth be told there are plenty of discussions and pseudo philosophical debates as to why people like watching these characters, so instead let’s look at how to make our fictional Jerks awesome.

Skills

In most fiction you’ll find the Jerk with a group of friends/peers/cohorts, and the first question that come to mind is why do they put up with the abuse that’s leveled at them from the Jerk. One reason why people continue to stick around the Jerk is that he’s good at what he does, so good in fact that people are willing to or have to put up with the jerk to get things done. The most recent case of this is that come to mind House from the show… well you know. House is a jerk to everyone withing ten feet of him but the patients put up with because he can save their lives, his peers put up with him because he can see things that they miss and his boss puts up with him because of the unparalleled level of success he has. People deal with House because he’s skilled if not the most skilled at what he does, and readers and watchers can admire a jerk for his prowess even if they wouldn’t want to stand next to him on any given day of the week.

It’s never lupus

Humor

Humor is one of the best ways to endear a Jerk to his audience, shows like Big Bang Theory rely on the comedic affect of their Jerk to make him interesting. Sheldon Cooper may be just as brilliant as House but his brilliance has no ties to his group of friends outside of how much it annoys them, in fact most of the time the group tries to stay as far away from Sheldon as possible. No Sheldon’s a great character and great Jerk because of his lack of understanding or concern for human emotions. These lead to situations that while you wouldn’t personally want to be apart of, you can still take a moment to laugh at them. Just remember to have reason to keep your jerk in contact with the rest of the characters in your fiction, you don’t want your audience asking themselves why this guy is hanging around, or why the rest of the guys are hanging around him. Big Bang Theory tethers Sheldon and Leonard together by making them roommates, while Leonard could leave Sheldon he’d have to give up his home to do so, similar plot devices can be used to make your fiction more reasonable. The end goal here is to make your Jerk entertaining, whether that means wacky hi-jinks ensue or that he seems to be the only sane man left in the group, either you make the audience laugh with him or laugh at him.

morals

Most people like Jerks that turn out to be decent human beings, at least for a moment or so. The major point of making your Jerk secretly nice or at least not as jerkish, is that it adds character depth, it shows us and possibly the other characters in your fiction that there’s more here then what meets the eye. Brandon Sanderson does this particularly well with two notable major characters in his Mist Born series, the first is a thief that has the magic ability to manipulate peoples emotions, the Jerk uses his magic not only to steal things but also to manipulate his friends, colleges, servants and passersby to do as he wishes or collect things he’s to lazy to get himself. Being a manipulative Jerk is a core part of his personality, but it’s reveal in later parts of the series that he doesn’t just manipulate people to get what he wants, he manipulates people to calm them down in a tense situation, or to relax away a friends fear before they get on stage to talk, Sanderson shows his Jerk going out of his way to discretely make peoples live better. And while you don’t get to hear his thoughts on why he does this, you get to hear the thoughts of the other lead characters which act a surrogate for the audience allowing them to feel similar emotions towards the Jerk, Making an annoying individual into a much more likable character.

Interests

The most important thing about you Jerk is that he has to be interesting, much like any character in any piece of fiction, one of the worst sin your jerk can commit is being boring. A Jerk has an interesting position because he already sits outside of how people act in there day to day lives, he says and does things with no fear of social backlash.Not only that the Jerk can say and do the things that the rest of your characters can’t or won’t, he can point out the holes in your heroes plans and call your damsel in distress out on her love triangle non-sense and generally lampshape much of the drama that’s going on. Particularly savvy Jerks can see the what looks like a standard plot point and act to avoid it, or manipulate it for his own benefit, though if he’s not skilled he’s the one who can say “I told you so.” Your Jerk is most likely going to be an amalgam of the things stated much like any character worth his font, and it goes without saying that all the things you do make interesting, unique and believable character also applies to your Jerk, your jerk doesn’t have to be skilled jerk, he doesn’t have to be a funny jerk, he doesn’t have to be a jerk with a heart of gold, but he can’t just be a jerk jerk. Because at that point the character isn’t only boring, he’s also annoying and most folks already have enough annoying people they want to punch in the face in their day to day, don’t add your jerk to that list.